Earlier this week, Adam Proteau wrote about the Montreal Canadiens’ rivalry with the Ottawa Senators. While there’s no arguing that a rivalry exists and that both franchises’ players dislike each other, that rivalry is still a far cry from the best the Canadiens have ever known.
Granted, Brendan Gallagher calling out Tim Stutzle for embellishment, and Juraj Slafkovsky mentioning that he needs to play like Brady Tkachuk to be successful, have added fuel to a fire that was already burning. Still, we’re not in inferno territory, at least not yet.
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I’m not sure any rivalry will ever match the one the Canadiens had with the Quebec Nordiques, after living it firsthand from 1980 to 1996. I was born in 1980 in Saint-Jean-Chrysostome, a small town that has since been merged with Lévis on the South Shore of Quebec. As a result, I was destined to be a Nordiques fan. However, my dad, a die-hard Fleury fan, made one fatal mistake: he introduced me to hockey the year Patrick Roy arrived on the scene.
As I discovered the sport that would become a lifelong passion, Roy was making save after save after save and was fast becoming my favourite player. It didn’t take long before I started watching the games wearing pillows on my legs and mimicking the saves the Canadiens’ goaltender was making.
That Spring, the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup, and that was it. I was, at the tender age of 6, a fully-fledged Canadiens fan to my father’s disgust. Although, to be fair, he did manage to convince my mother to let me watch all the games, even the late ones in the final against the Calgary Flames.
From then on, every morning, I was stealing the newspaper from him to see what was happening in the hockey world and the standings. If his Nordiques had lost, I would have teased him relentlessly all day, and if the Habs had done the same.
I was too young to watch the Adams Division’s playoffs the year of the Good Friday mayhem, or the following year when the Nordiques were hungry for revenge. Decades later, though, I read a book that made it clear to me just how massive the Quebec-Montreal rivalry was.
The book was The Hockey News’: The Greatest Game I Ever Played. It’s a fun read that features 40 articles about some of the best or most significant games in which players, coaches, and even a referee have taken part.
The sixth article is about former referee Kerry Fraser, who officiated the 1985 series between the two teams. It was a year after the Good Friday massacre, and he was on duty for Game 7. In his third year in the league at the tender age of 32, this was going to be the most crucial game he had ever worked.
So important that when he woke up on game day, his body was entirely covered in red blotches, which were itchy and painful, sending him running to the nearest drugstore and the pharmacist. He told him that he was more than likely suffering from a bad case of the hives brought on by anxiety, and he sent him on his way with an antihistamine. That’s how big and meaningful this rivalry was.
Eight years later, the two teams faced one another again in the first round of the playoffs, and the teasing from my dad reached epic proportions by the time the Nordiques took a 2-0 lead. Like many Quebec fans, he thought Montreal was down and out, but it was far from being the case.
As the Canadiens started to claw their way back in the series, I was able to reciprocate and take things to a whole new level when Montreal won the sixth game, taking the series. My dad watched the rest of the playoffs with me, and you could see he was getting more annoyed with every Canadiens’ win, biding his time until my team would suffer the same fate as his, so he could rub it in. However, that moment never came.
We had no idea that less than two years later, he would lose his team forever as the Nordiques would be sold and moved to Colorado. That, I did not make fun of. Neither did he make fun of me on the December 1995 night when the Canadiens were obliterated by the Detroit Red Wings and my favourite player called time on his career with the Habs.
I was 15 back then, and I was so upset that the Canadiens chose Mario Tremblay over the face of the franchise; I couldn’t even comprehend how that was happening. Days later, when Roy was traded to the Colorado Avalanche, my dad looked at me and said, 'Well, guess we could root for the same team now.' Colorado has my team and your goaltender.
I couldn’t do it, I had been a Canadiens’ fan for nearly ten years by then, and it would have felt wrong. A few months later, though, when my geography teacher organised a field trip that included Roy’s return to Montreal in Colorado’s colours, I wore a Nordiques jersey for the first time in my life... and as much as I wanted to support Roy, it felt oh so wrong.
Photo credit: Ed Mulholland-Imagn Images
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